The elephant at the beautiful botanical gardens, that would go and buy himself food when given the proper amount of money was interesting, but he was not the real attraction at Saigon. Our party had been entertained by the Geisha girls, sung almost to distraction (you know it is impolite for the sing-song girls of China to stop singing until requested to stop). We had watched the dancing of the Javanese and Philippine Ballerinas, but, we had to come here to see the real French girls. We now understand why many of our soldiers came home with French wives - "vamp" is the only word we could think of in describing every one of them. Never before had we seen so many picture hats. What fun we all had airing our moth-eaten French. (Here I am not referring to the few of our party that speak French fluently.) And it was several days before some of us stopped calling the Chinese cabin-boys "Garcon." Perhaps, to show that the San Francisco committee appreciated the distinction of being on board a ship fifteen feet longer than any other American steamer to make that port, we broke off part of the propeller as a souvenir in departing. Chapter X Manila Never were more elaborate preparations made to receive our big delegation. Some said it was a wise precaution to have the day the Philippine Chamber of Commerce were to entertain us before the publishing of the "Wood-Forbes Report;" but after the report had been made public we found the laughter and shouts of "Viva" (long life) from the children and the heartfelt greetings of their elders, were cordiality and good-fellowship personified. We were told that there were three times the number of people in Java as in the Philippines, but that the Philippines could easily support a population of 50,000,000. We were so glad to hear this, as there are more babies there than any other place in the Orient, with the exception of Japan, but the Philippine babies seem to be free from the awful sores we noted on many of the Japanese children. However, it seems that infant mortality is great in the Philippines, on account of the improper diet of the mothers and many of the babies die, we were told, as their mother's milk does not agree with them. One of the first orders of Governor-General Leonard Wood was to call a meeting to check the infant mortality.